I haven't used the addins, but any real regex support should allow you to
extract multiple matches in one shot. However, you'd still need a bit of
code to identify the max value.

Kyle
On Jul 2, 2013 10:51 AM, "Harper, Cynthia" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I've used a couple of Add-ins for regexp in excel, but I wondered if
> regexp had the ability to test the multiple matches in a single-line
> expression.  But I guess that does require a multiline program - I'll use
> VB. Thanks.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Kyle Banerjee
> Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2013 11:47 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Regular expression for maximum 4-digit number
>
> AFAIK, Excel has no built in regex capabilities so you'd need to call
> vbscript from Excel to do this.
>
> In any case, you'll need to write an actual program to evaluate each line
> since multiple values can occur in the same line. This will be easier if
> done as text than in VBA. Besides, the data in Excel came from Mil in text
> to begin with.
>
> There are many ways to do what you want, but perl would be hard to beat
> for this use case
>
> Kyle
> On Jul 2, 2013 10:02 AM, "Harper, Cynthia" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Is there a way to return (in Excel, if possible) the largest 4-digit
> > number (by word boundaries) in a string?  I've extracted the 863
> > fields from Millennium for my active periodicals, and want to find the
> > latest year in each run.  I'm willing to estimate it by taking the
> > largest 4-digit number in the string. I'm doing this in Excel.  Any help?
> >
> > Cindy Harper
> > Electronic Services and Serials Librarian Virginia Theological
> > Seminary
> > 3737 Seminary Road
> > Alexandria VA 22304
> > 703-461-1794
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
>